Cophylogenetic interactions between marine viruses and eukaryotic picophytoplankton

Abstract

Mechanisms other than true cospeciation, such as host-switching, might explain a part of the data. It has been observed in a previous study on the same taxa that the genomic divergence between host pairs is larger than between their viruses. It implies that if cospeciation predominates in this algae-virus system, this would support the hypothesis that prasinoviruses evolve more slowly than their microalgal hosts, whereas host switching would imply that these viruses speciated more recently than the divergence of their host genera.